BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Author J.C. Herz was on the telephone, talking to her editor -- no, beseeching her editor: "Don't make me go back! Please, don't make me go back there." The place she dreaded was sometimes in the living room of her tiny cottage apartment in Coral Gables, Florida. Or it was on the tiled floor at the foot of her bed. It was anywhere, really, that the 23-year-old writer could sprawl with her laptop computer, reach a telephone jack and plug into the Internet.

For months Herz had been online every day, six hours a day, researching a book she was writing called Surfing on the Internet. She yakked with people on Internet Relay Chat, vamped in simulated worlds known as muds, foundered in E-mail and bombarded her brain with Usenet newsgroups carrying names like alt.alien.visitors. Finally, she couldn't take another bit. "It was the classic information overload, toxic-data syndrome," she says, with more and more messages to read and less and less time to read them. The Internet "stopped looking like some kind of theme park and started looking like a Sartrean hell-too many people talking at one time."

Though her editor forced her to return to the Net to finish her book, Herz has since resurfaced in the real world -- for good. She joins the growing ranks of disillusioned refugees who ventured into cyberspace and have now made the long march back. They bring tales of unmet expectations and warnings about a shimmering electronic mirage that seemed to promise intellectual, emotional and even financial sustenance but delivered nothing real. There's too much information and not enough substance, they gripe. Millions of people and no worthwhile communication. A solipsistic time sink that makes television watching seem like a social event.

Much of this backlash is predictable, driven by the yearly migration of pack journalists racing from one trendy locale to the next and then turning back to sneer at the place they just left. Some of it comes from the I-told-you-so quarter, composed largely of reactionary fogies who flaunt the fact that they don't know a modem from a mousetrap. "The modern world is not dying for want of more information," Russell Baker harrumphed in a New York Times column last month, assailing, among other things, the word cyberspace itself ("... if you were given a choice of places to spend a month, which name would you select-Tuscany or Cyberspace?").

But the most damning -- and noteworthy -- critiques are coming from a crop of new books written by people who have spent a few years (or in some cases a few decades) in cyberspace and know whereof they speak. One of them is Clifford Stoll-a gangly, wild-haired astronomer who got his first modem in 1971 and jacked it into the Internet's precursor, the Arpanet. His 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg, which told how he used the Net to trap some German hacker spies, was the first Internet-related best seller. How does he feel now about the place he helped popularize?

"I think it's high time people stand up and say, 'Look, you are missing nothing online,' " he says. Stoll has written a controversial new book, Silicon Snake Oil, that he describes as a "yellow warning flag" to would-be networkers. Beware, he says, that when you enter cyberspace, "you are entering a nonexistent universe ... a soluble tissue of nothing."

Stoll isn't dismissing computers altogether. He acknowledges that the Internet has served him well over the years, allowing him to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, bringing news from around the world. "But at what a price!" he writes. "Simply keeping track of this electronic neighborhood takes a couple of hours every night ... Bit by bit, my days dribble away, trickling out my modem."

It's a complaint that may resonate with millions of computer owners. Part of the problem is that expectations have been set too high. Stoll blasts what he calls "Internet hucksters burbling with falsehoods" about how the network is creating a global village, breaking down geographic boundaries and allowing new communities to grow up around shared interests and ideas.

Heady as that might seem at first, it may not be enough. "Life in the real world," Stoll writes, "is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen." His advice to anyone spending more than a few hours online per day: Get out of the house! Meet your neighbors face to face! Grow tomatoes! Turn the computer off, for heaven's sake!

Stephen L. Talbott, a technical editor at O'Reilly & Associates, finally did just that. A philosopher by training, and briefly a farmer, Talbott went online 14 years ago. In the beginning, he enjoyed the free flow of information and the sense that he was exploring an uncharted frontier. But he found that as the offerings on the Net grew exponentially, so did the time he spent there. Toward the end, he was online four or five hours a day doing Internet-related work. Finally, in December, he cut himself off from the Net completely. "I immediately felt very good," he says. "I could think again."

In his forthcoming book The Future Does Not Compute!, Talbott argues that computer networks are inhibiting human interaction by letting people talk computer-to-computer rather than person-to-person. "Everything in society is being adapted to the Net and computerized technology," he says. "And that's a process that appears to be running quite out of control."

Bill Henderson has been in control of his computer-free life for some time now, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He presides over the Lead Pencil Club in Wainscott, New York, an organization that eschews high technology, especially E-mail, faxes and anything even remotely wired. Their motto: "What's the hurry?"

"We're thriving," says Henderson, who enjoys nothing so much as bicycling to the post office in his small town. Club membership has swollen to 600 over the past two years, and Henderson, who is also president of the high-toned Pushcart Press, is putting out a book this fall filled with letters from unplugged Leaddites around the world. "These are cries from the heart about what electronics has done to people," he says. Most of the letters were written, by hand, with a trusty No. 2. ^1